Reader is Dead, Long Live the Feedly and the Prismatic

The girls are at Korean class, their mommy is studying in the library, and daddy gets to relax in the morning with a coffee. I’d like to have a nap, but I never seem to be able to fall asleep in the morning once I’m up.

Come around 14:00, and that all changes.

My reading this morning is courtesy of Feedly and Prismatic.

Feedly I turned to after the death of Google Reader. I’m still having problems figuring out why Google thought Reader had no value. Can’t they datamine it as well as they can with Google Books or G+? It figures, the one option that really isn’t available elsewhere and they trash it.

I looked at a few other options once Reader died. The second best option for me was Old Reader. Feedly just seemed easier to grok for me. I think Old Reader works fine, but Feedly just delivers and interacts smoother for me. Maybe because I am not a bells & whistles kind of guy. I want all my rss feed headlines thrown up there and then I’ll surf through them. No muss. No fuss. That’s Feedly.

If you’re looking for an alternative to Google Reader, I’d check out both Feedly and Old Reader.

Prismatic is this curious service that is supposed to randomly deliver articles to you based on your interests. It’s supposed to learn from the articles you choose and refine what it delivers to you through that learning. This leads me to wonder why Google couldn’t prise that same kind of information from Reader and monetize it. They seem to be able to do that with every other platform they offer.

I hit Prismatic once Feedly runs dry, and while it lacks the QC that Feedly inherently possesses (because you pick the feeds with Feedly), it does tend to deliver one or two gems every day. Some are gems because they are very interesting – like the Mary Sue article about the archaeological discovery of a warrior princess everyone assumed to be a dude because she was a warrior – and all warriors are dudes, dude! Others are gems because they lead me to places and people I would have never otherwise encountered. Generally this is in the tinfoil hat/conspiracy/ufologist camp.

One of these places I would have never encountered actually depressed me. It’s this guy’s website (no, I am not going to link to it, because it is bad. B. A. D.) and an article about King Arthur and the Sarmatian knights trope (I’m not going to dignify it by calling it a theory, because it’s a theory in the same way ‘the Greys’ are a theory – and if you need to see it used as it should be used, check out Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur). The problem was this guy throwing around terms like ‘most historians agree’ or ‘it’s generally accepted’ for stuff with which most historians would absolutely not agree or facts that I have never seen accepted in a peer-reviewed article or in a book written by an accepted authority.

Of course, the article lacked any semblance of references or citations.

However, Prismatic remains pretty awesome and a fun way to find stuff you might otherwise not find.